Last modified on March 29, 2019 by Brad Phillips

Break the Pattern and Keep the Audience

We fill our lives with familiar routes, steady routines, predictable preferences, automatic responses, unshakeable beliefs, and typical behavior. Do you notice a pattern? What if we were to break the pattern?

First, let’s answer why humans, by nature, are creatures of habit. We’ve learned to recognize patterns that are not a threat and tune them out. When we do that, we can reserve our energy to quickly detect change.

That was a useful skill for our ancestors, who were fending off pre-historic animals and other threats. Those dangerous threats have passed, but our predisposition to tune out unchanging stimuli has not. For a public speaker, this powerful, evolutionary tendency can sink a presentation.

In the following video, Throughline’s Brad Phillips and Christina Mozaffari, share some tips and techniques on how to “break the pattern,” a topic we cover in our public speaking courses.